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U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.

If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.

Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.

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If you’ll notice my posting history it comes in little bursts. I basically never write very long entries. There’s a reason for it.

That’s because outside of this cute rarefied forum, I don’t have a silly little email job that allows me to get large amount of screen time and pop in here and write big theses with multiple citations. I have a real job in which I work insane hours and it that requires my full attention, and a family with young children.

So I found myself parked on the side of the road trying to find a source in an old x thread that would pass muster to make some random person believe that fresh off the boat immigrants from one of the most backwards countries on earth immediately change their entire way of life and diet the second they pop off the plane due to ‘magic culture’ and ‘magic laws’ which are basically unenforced. And that people in different countries eat different meat, including bushmeat. The absurdity of the situation sank in, and I resumed the important task I had at hand.

Even now at the ass crack of dawn as I write this on my phone, my daughter points to this as she climbs on me over and over again and exclaims “wow! That’s a lot of words!”.

Very politely, I’ll recommend you do a google search. Specifically about cat eating as a cultural practice. If you do it “raw” you’ll be greeted by a tidal wave of screeds of legacy media screaming “hoax” at the top of their lungs you. There’s also a handful of reels & tiktoks from people, some Haitian, saying this is true.

But if you know a bit about search, and can pull articles from say ten years or older, you might be surprised at what you see. The thread on X that I was looking for but unable to find even included a bbc article about which cultures ate cats, but I’m certain the Haitian portion of it was scrubbed after the controversy. They tend to do that.

Anyways, I’ve wasted enough time on this. Good luck in your search to find out that not everywhere is like the USA, I guess.

A single link of evidence would have sufficed, and taken less time to write. It beggars belief that such a well documented and common cultural practice would be so difficult to find evidence for.

Since you keep playing the motte and Bailey game, I'll remind you that you asserted cat eating was going on as common practice IN THE USA. Even what you recommend that I look up to prove YOUR point does not actually prove the point you are trying to make!

You don't have to pretend that you're being polite when you snark to me implying I can't do a search, that I don't have a job and family as real and important and serious as yours, that I'm autistic or have brainstorms.

It is to clear to me, to you, and to anyone else reading this (god help them) that you are not being polite, I'm not being particularly polite, and we don't respect each other very much. Don't insult anyone's intelligence by pretending otherwise.

While I'm giving advice, (since that seems to be what we're doing here) I'd also recommend against engaging up until the point you realize you cannot and only then pulling out the 'I have better and more important things to do' card. You had the time to write everything leading up to this. You either play the card right away or admit that you simply don't want to engage in a battle that points out shortcomings in your thinking.

If you truly refuse to defend the things you say, then I suppose all I can say is good luck with your 'insane hours' and 'family'. May I meet you again elsewhere on this forum and obliterate you again in the marketplace of ideas.

Look, demanding "cite?" can be an obnoxious form of argumentation and you are not required to provide one on demand. People here are very prone to (selectively) demanding links to evidence when they don't believe something, but that is the nature of this forum - you are supposed to proactively provide evidence, especially in proportion to the inflammatory nature of your claims.

But I'm not admonishing you here for failing to provide evidence. I'm admonishing you because your response to someone asking you for evidence was "Well, I do real work, not like you worthless paper-pushers, I'm too busy with my real and valuable life and family to care about what I write here."

And, you know, good for you. Spending time with your daughter is undoubtedly a better use of your time than arguing with Internet randos. But don't jump into an argument with inflammatory claims, and when challenged, play this "I'm too busy and I have a real life" card. That is really obnoxious.

Fair. I had planned just to stay silent and move on, but I was angry at his annoying responses. And I am legitimately annoyed at myself for spending so much time and energy on something inconsequential.

Won’t happen again. I will say formatting his response in such a way as “I demand you respond to me, if you don’t you don’t belong here.” Is way, way more obnoxious than what I wrote.

Also, I’ll also say that stating a culture eats cats is not inflammatory per se. I don’t think pointing out that some European cultures eat horse or certain East Asian cultures eat dog is inflammatory. Or that some cultures eat bugs.

I eat guinea pig and rabbit, for example. Lots of people think of them as pets and think of me as a bit monstrous for eating them.

There’s a tremendous amount of diversity in the world in regards to diet. It’s not inflammatory at all to point that out, and it’s certainly not inflammatory to point out recent arrivals from other countries being their habits with them.

Is it the combination of the two that is automatically inflammatory?